Puffins have been around for five million years and survived ice ages. But experts say up to 90% of Britain's favourite birds could be wiped out by 2050

The first time you see one, you can only shout for glee and excitement.

At the sight of the small fat darting shape flying surprisingly fast, with a massive multi-coloured beak and a look of amusement in its curling eye, you let fly one of the most pleasing words in the English language: ‘Puffin!’

Preacher, sea parrot, lundy, bottle nose, little friar, clown of the sea: you can tell how much humans love something by the nicknames we bestow on it.

And there is perhaps no bird of the air or beast of the field that we love half so much as Fratercula arctica, the Atlantic puffin.

But now the most beguiling, charismatic and singular figure to grow feathers is under threat. Britain is home to 580,000 breeding pairs of Atlantic puffins, making up about 9 per cent of the European population. But the British Trust for Ornithology this week warned that changes in climate and food supply could wipe out up to 90 per cent of our sea parrots as soon as 2050.

It is a dire warning, but it is also as yet an unwritten chapter in the ongoing story of these exquisite survivors, for local populations have fallen and recovered before.

Some puffin populations in Pembrokeshire crashed between the 1890s and 1920s, then boomed in the 20th century, thanks partly to conservation efforts.

The population in Lundy off the north Devon coast recovered with the eradication of predators such as rats. Scottish islands saw drops in the 2000s and rises in the 2010s, linked to fluctuations in sand eel populations, puffins’ main food.

They need our help, but if ever a species were designed by nature to inspire action and by its character to survive, it was surely this magnificent ‘circus’ – the collective noun for puffins on land, along with ‘colony’ or ‘burrow’.

At sea, they’re called a ‘raft’. In the air, a ‘whirl’ or ‘wheel’. I’ve been fascinated by puffins since I was 16, when I volunteered as an assistant warden on the island of Skomer, off the Pembrokeshire coast, where the birds have been breeding since the end of the last Ice Age.

I visited in May, when puffins tend to return to land to breed after up to eight months away at sea. In spring the coasts are at their most heavenly, the clifftops sweet with golden gorse and bright with pink thrift flowers.

You see puffins zipping in low over the surf, bobbing on the waves and emerging triumphantly from the sea with sand eels in their bills.

Those bills may appear comical, but they are highly practical. Bright blue at the base and scarlet at the tip, with butter-yellow piping, they’re weapons, trenching tools, dating aids and signal boxes.

The beak changes colour through the year: vibrant in the spring-summer breeding season, dull-grey to brown while at sea in autumn and winter.

Inside, on the roof of the mouth, Velcro-like spikes enable the puffin to catch one fish after another, diving into the ocean, snapping right and left at depths of up to 200 feet and holding each sand eel crosswise, like sardines in a tin.

Michael Harris, one of the great seabird ornithologists, observed one record-setting bird in 1994 ‘which had 61 sand eels and a rockling [an eel-like fish] clamped in its beak’.

Arriving home after wintering in the wild Atlantic, puffins come sweeping in to land, their bright-orange webbed feet splayed wide, acting as air-brakes.

That vivid hue means their diet has been rich in antioxidants, signalling these feet belong to a healthy and potent potential partner.

Next, male puffins see off their rivals with thrusts and sweeps of their beaks. They are intensely territorial, fiercely defending the small patch of earth in front of their burrows, which tend to be only 10in wide – a whole world to a puffin, which typically stand at just 8in tall. Nearby, ideally, there will be a ‘loafing rock’, where off-duty birds hang out, watching and talking in ‘arr-arr-arr’ sounds, like parrots swapping dirty jokes.

When they wish to make peace, they toss their heads and tuck their bills downwards. When males and females fall for each other, they put their bills together, courting and caressing like cherubs wearing false noses.

The writer Adam Nicolson lived alone with puffins for months at a time on the Shiant Isles in Scotland – a group of largely uninhabited islands south-east of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

He does not see them as cute sea parrots, but rather as astounding survivors.

‘They are five million years old – they survived ice ages,’ he says.

‘After finding a mate, young puffins spread out alone across the Atlantic in winter, from Newfoundland to Morocco, learning the ocean. They memorise an entire map of the fish, the currents, the feeding grounds, and they are alone all that time.

‘Then somehow they find their way back. Thousands of them gather in rafts offshore, and then Mr and Mrs Puffin find each other again.’

They are also intensely loyal and mate for life – the oldest known pairing lasted well over 30 years. But the birds separate at the end of the breeding season, only finding each other again in May if both survive their pelagic odysseys. And there is another twist.

‘Studies found that they are actually more loyal to the burrow than the mate,’ says Nicolson. ‘Sit in a puffin colony – it is a theatre of sex and territory and display.’

Rather like humans, puffins set about life with mighty determination. In making and maintaining their burrows, their bill becomes a chisel, pliers, shovel and catapult – puffins have been seen kicking out rocks more than twice their height, and flinging earth 3ft in the air. Breeding colonies are so intensely mined and burrowed that islands can be partly reshaped by them.

‘It seems to be a habit of puffins to colonise a turfy island, work it to ruin, and, perforce, depart for new territory,’ observed Ronald Lockley, a naturalist who lived on the next island along from Skomer, Skokholm, in the 1950s and is commemorated as one of the great naturalists of his time.

They line the inside of the nest with feathers, grass and vegetation including clifftop flowers, a bower for one precious egg.

The puffling – yes, the puffling – hatches after 40 nights or so, and is fed by both parents.

Our species and theirs have known one another since the Stone Age, when archaeological records show that puffins were probably being eaten at Inchnadamph in the Scottish Highlands. In the ninth century they were a staple diet in Shetland.

On a visit to the Faroe islands four years ago I was mildly horrified to discover that the Faroese still eat them. Recipes vary but one involves burying dead puffins until they ferment, then boiling them. No thanks.

It seems right that some birds should be just too marvellous, too charming and too splendid to consume with any pleasure.

‘They are intensely local,’ says Nicolson. The north Pacific and the Arctic are home to millions of horned puffins – named for the ‘horn’ or spike above their eyes – and tufted puffins known for having black feathers.

The loss of the Atlantic puffin from our waters would be a tragedy for anyone who longs to see one, but if they have to move north these resilient seabirds will. ‘They aren’t cute! They’re ferocious,’ says Nicolson. ‘It’s one of the reasons we love them.’